http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/thunderstorms-contain-dark-lightning-invisible-pulses-of-powerful-radiation/2013/04/08/1c796ebc-8a76-11e2-a051-6810d606108d_story.html

"A lightning bolt is one of nature’s most over-the-top phenomena,
rarely failing to elicit at least a ping of awe no matter how many
times a person has witnessed one. With his iconic kite-and-key
experiments in the mid-18th century, Benjamin Franklin showed that
lightning is an electrical phenomenon, and since then the general view
has been that lightning bolts are big honking sparks no different in
kind from the little ones generated by walking in socks across a
carpeted room.

But scientists recently discovered something mind-bending about
lightning: Sometimes its flashes are invisible, just sudden pulses of
unexpectedly powerful radiation. It’s what Joseph Dwyer, a lightning
researcher at the Florida Institute of Technology, has termed dark
lightning."
<more>

Reply via email to